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20 October 2013

Pack of the Day 36: What's in My First Pack of 2013 Topps Update Series?

My local Target got 2013 Topps Update in a couple of days ago, so I had to try some of it out. I thought I'd show every card from my first pack of it in order, but I was too lazy to do 12 scans, so I did them in groups of three. I did at least make sure that they go left to right in the order in which they came out of the pack.

First up was Alexi Amarista, who was featured on the blog All the Way to the Backstop just a few short days ago. We are already in negotiations to have me send it out to the rightful owner.

Martin Perez and Scott (Stop Typing Andy) van Slyke had me saying, "Who?" which will be a pretty common theme with this set, it seems. It's almost worse than Bowman, because these dudes have all played major league games and should in theory be more memorable than prospects.

It's a good thing Adam Jones showed up in an All-Star card, because I was going to have a hard time with these three cards. Don Kelly did get himself a nice photo for his card front, so he's got that going for him.

The Chasing History set that carried through Series' 1 and 2 is alive and well for Update. This pack gives us a card featuring Tom Seaver's quest to have the most Opening Day starts of any pitcher. Did he make it? I don't know I didn't even read the back of the card. It's bad enough to open packs of cards in your car in the Target parking lot; who in their right mind is going to read them too? Not this guy. Segura had himself quite a year this year. I had him rostered early in the year on some of my fantasy baseball teams, but probably wound up dropping him for established guys like JJ Hardy or something. A lot of winning teams kept Segura on their rosters. Ian Kennedy has got a very ginger beard. You can't catch him; he's the Ginger Beard Man!

I've heard Jeanmar Gomez' name before, but I'll be darned if I can remember a thing about him. His ball cap is pretty snazzy, though. I don't know a thing about these other two guys. And with Juan Lagares we come to the end of this pack. But before we end this post I want to talk about pack searching.

On the day I bought the previously-discussed pack of Topps Update, I also bought a rack pack of Update and a pack of this Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey stuff. All of the new boxes of cards were freshly opened and orderly. The hanger box with Update in it had a uniform stack of packs going all the way up, the regular box of Update was orderly, and the box of Artifacts had two nice fresh rows of packs in it.

The next day I went into the same store and discovered evidence that my local Target must have a resident pack searcher. The first thing I noticed was that all of the Artifacts packs had been turned sideways in the box and were crumpled. Then I saw that all of the Update packs had been removed from the hanger box and then shoved back in from the bottom, so they were all sideways and upside down and smashed around each other. The same went for the fresh box of Update that was sitting on the shelf. All of the packs had been felt up, and it looked like a good number of the cards must certainly be damaged. I was pretty irritated, but what can you do about it?

Besides, what is the line you draw when it comes to searching packs? The very day before I had been looking at the rack packs hanging from hooks and noticed that I could see through the Update packs. The first card in the front pack of Update was obviously Puig's Rookie Card. I could see the 66 on his uniform from 3 feet away. So I bought that pack. Is that pack searching? I didn't cause damage to the other packs trying to seek that particular card out, but I did circumvent the random nature of buying trading cards by choosing a pack that I knew contained something specific.

And even though I've been playing fantasy hockey for a few years and even win a few leagues from time to time, the only guy in that pack of Artifacts whose name I was familiar with was Kris Letang. Why did I buy a pack of hockey cards? Because it was new and shiny.

About Me

The intention of my blogs is to focus on my hobbies, but they often wind up covering other things instead. My dormant blog, The Raz File, is centered on miniature wargames and painting. My other blog, The Raz Card Blog, is about trading cards and collectibles.